Associates
Instead of just “viewing” associates, an Admin User can add, edit, and delete them.
 | Watch our YouTube video about the Associate Manager at https://youtu.be/5NxoFEawB3Y
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When you click on Edit for a given associate, you will be taken to a screen with fields where you can make changes.
The system keeps a history of the hourly rate and effective date. So as expected, work done prior to a raise is paid at the old rate, and work done afterwards at the new rate. This is true regardless of the date when the Payroll report is run.
Title Field
The title field can be any value you like, and is not tied to any other part of SMMware in a concrete way.
Type Field
The type field is also not tied to any other part of SMMware, with the exception that if you choose type “Vehicle”, it affects charges to the client for travel. See the separate section about Vehicles.
Color
A color assigned to an associate has just one purpose. When editing an event and when using the “Availability” approach to attendee management, the colors are used for the ‘week’ view, so that you can easily tell which employee is available/unavailable. See the Scheduling section of the Team Lead Manual for more detail.
Job Code Level
When using job codes, there may be multiple sets of codes. A common scenario provides one set for Team Members, and another set for Team Leads. A given associate will get to choose from the set they are assigned to. There can be overlap between sets. If you are not using Job Codes, this setting will have no effect.
Invitable
The ‘Invitable’ dropdown affects scheduling. When a new event is created in scheduling, a list of Associates is presented for choosing attendees/invitees. Invitable must be set to “yes” for the Associate to appear in this list. Some Associates may not be involved in events (Ex: a Bookkeeper), and the purpose of this setting is that they should not receive unneeded emails.
Contact Via
The “Contact Via” setting is used for Scheduling, Tasks, and Calls. The Road Map of future development includes contact via texting, and this setting is in anticipation of that. The dropdown can be set to “Neither” to prevent any emails/texts being sent.
Termination Date
As would be intuitive, an associate cannot be deleted once they have made any hours/expense/mileage entries. When an associate is no longer be with the company, the appropriate action is to set a Termination Date in their profile. If they should return, just blank out the Termination Date to make them active again.
Only active associates can log in. Even if you don’t change their username/password, the fact that they have a Termination Date set will prevent logging in.
Admin Level
The options here are “Normal User”, “Team Lead”, “Admin”, “Senior Admin”, and “Company Owner”. This is a ‘master switch’, in that changing it also changes some of the individual settings described next. After you change this (and the individual ones get changed), you can still change those individual settings so as to ‘fine tune’ the associate’s permissions.
The Sales Role
If the Sales Role privileges are set to “None”, the Associate won’t have the “Sales Lead” item appear in their submenu under “Clients/Sales”. If this field is set to “Read/Write”, they will have the menu item and will be able to add/edit/delete Sales Leads.
The Marketing Role
If the Marketing Role privileges are set to “None”, the Associate won’t have the “MailChimp Commands” menu item under the Admin menu. If set to “Read/Write”, they will.
The HR Role
This role affects whether the Associate can add and edit Associates. Having it also allows them to see the pay rate for a user, and allows them access to the Payroll Report.
It also allows them to see the File Manager section under an Associate profile. The normal user who has this field set to “None” will not see the File Manager even under their own profile. Typical use of this File Manager is to store performance reviews.
Normal users can “View” the profile for other Associates, but various sensitive fields will have asterisks in them (such as hourly rate and home address). They can see email address and phone numbers, allowing Associates to contact each other.
The Scheduling Role
If the Scheduling Role privileges are set to None, the Associate won’t have the Master Calendar item appear in the menu (found in either the Admin menu or the main menu), and won’t have access. Read access means they can view it, and Read/Write access means they can add/edit/delete events from the Master Calendar. All Associates can view their “My Schedule” section on the homepage, regardless of the setting for this field.
Various Permissions
The follow permissions are straightforward, affecting the areas described by their titles:
- Manage Jobs (& Clients)
- Manage Flat Fees
- Manager Organizations/Contacts
- Manage File Shares
- Manage Invoices
Approve Invoices
From within the Invoice Manager, this permission allows the user to directly set the approval level of an invoice. As a prerequisite, the user has to already have ‘Manage Invoices’ set to ‘Read/Write’, so as to have edit access to the invoice.
Manage Consignment
If the Consignment module is not enabled, this permission has no effect.
Manage Inventory
If the Inventory module is not enabled, this permission has no effect.
QuickBooks Online Admin
This permission only appears if the person editing the Associate Profile has their ‘Admin Level’ set to ‘Company Owner’. The thinking behind this restriction is that this permission is important, will only be assigned to a few people in any given company, and is not expected to change often.
If the QuickBooks Online integration is not enabled (in Section 1 of the Settings Editor), this setting has no effect.
QuickBooks Desktop Admin
This permission only appears if the person editing the Associate Profile has their ‘Admin Level’ set to ‘Company Owner’.
If the QuickBooks Desktop integration is not enabled (in Section 1 of the Settings Editor), this setting has no effect.
Google Admin
This permission only appears if the person editing the Associate Profile has their ‘Admin Level’ set to ‘Company Owner’.
This permissions allows the user to set up integration with the Google Calendar (see Section 4, Calendar, in the Settings Editor). This permission is unrelated to access to the SMMware Master Calendar, and unrelated to a user having access at Google to any given Google Calendar.